Physical coordinates
Components live in real micrometers, not abstract grid tiles — geometry is true from the first placement.
A new way of designing photonic circuits
Design photonic circuits in a workspace that gives you the tools to iterate in days, not weeks.
Qfactr is a company focused on democratising photonic chip design. Lunima provides the open-source core: physical layout, PDK-aware components, explicit waveguide routing, simulation-aware loss calculation, hierarchy, and exports to your current workflow.
The Lunima workspace — placing components, routing waveguides, and running a power-flow simulation.
Routing that respects the physics
Every bend, crossing, and detour is loss — and you see it as you route.
A photonic die does not forgive bad geometry. Lunima routes waveguides as real S-bend and Manhattan paths between pins. One click of a button allows you to see the surfaces transmission and loss from the actual geometry.
Routed paths, not abstract netsLunima · routing
A component-aware canvas
Place real devices with real pins and footprints.
Work from PDK component libraries — splitters, couplers, phase shifters, grating couplers, detectors — each carrying physical pin positions and S-matrix data. Drop them onto the canvas and they behave like the parts they represent.
PDK-backed component libraryLunima · library
Export to your existing flow
One design, every downstream tool.
Export a single layout to the formats your team already runs — Nazca Python + GDS for fabrication, SAX/Simphony for circuit simulation, PhotonTorch for time-domain GPU runs, and Verilog-A/SPICE for co-simulation with electronics.
Nazca · GDS · SAX · PhotonTorch · Verilog-AAI that can see the design
Not a chatbot bolted onto a canvas.
Lunima's assistant works over structured circuit state — components, pins, routes, hierarchy and physical constraints — so natural-language editing and exploration stay grounded in the real design, not a disconnected prompt.
Structured design contextWhat you get today
A representation layer for photonic systems.
Explicit routing
Waveguides are routed as S-bend and Manhattan paths between real pins, not drawn as abstract nets.
Hierarchical blocks
Build reusable subcircuits with external pins and frozen layouts, then compose larger systems.
PDK-aware parts
Component libraries carry physical pins and S-matrix data, so parts behave like the devices they represent.
Simulation-aware
Transmission and loss derive from the actual path geometry, keeping design intent tied to physics.
Open foundation
Built on the open Lunima engine, with Nazca export to hand off to the fab flow you already run.
Roadmap
Building toward routing-aware photonic layout automation.
The product today gives photonic circuits a visual, editable, physically grounded workspace. Here is what Qfactr are building next — not yet shipped.
Refined UI & advanced routing
A more customizable routing workflow with a refined interface, stronger autorouting and more control over how photonic connections are shaped, constrained and edited.
Generative placement model
An in-house generative model for placing photonic components at scale — routing-aware layout exploration that proposes arrangements which respect the physical difficulty of routing waveguides through dense systems.
The team
Built by photonics, ML and EDA engineers who have hit this problem first hand.
A team of ex-FAANG engineers and photonics researchers, advised by professors at the top of the field.
- Prior work
- Princeton · Amazon · Akhtonics
- Stage
- Seed · 2026
- Location
- Princeton, NJ
Build photonic systems in a workspace that understands layout, routing, and physical structure.
Download · Lunima
Run it on your machine.
Pick your platform. The app installs, runs, and updates locally.
Latest release v0.9.0 · unsigned builds (clear quarantine on first macOS launch)Questions? Read the docs →